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Oct27

Continuing to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Chap. 16 Vina Divina

Quotations:

  • "By her dying she has momentarily re-invented their sense of a larger kinship, of their membership in the family of mankind." [p. 480]
  • "The standard model of the universe tells us that after the big bang, matter was not evenly distributed through the new cosmos. There was clumping, and from these aggregates of matter were born the galaxies and stars. Likewise, as the human race explodes out of doors, it clumps." [p. 481]
  • "In all the world, or so it seems, there is only this single, uniting event: the miracle of the stadiums, the people gathering to share their loss". [p. 481]
  • "The lords of information have been caught napping by the unexpected gigantism of the death and after-death of Vina Apsara, but within hours the greatest media operation of the century is well under way ... Video packages are wrapped, sound is bitten. ... Meaning itself is the prize. Overnight, the meaning of Vina's deth has become the most important subject on earth." [p. 482]  Princess Diana?
  • "Now, however, the initial purity of what happens is almost instantly replaced by its televisualization. Once it's been on tv, people are no longer acting, but performing. Not simply grieving, but performing grief. Not creating a phenomenon out of their raw unmediated desires, but rushing to be part of a phenomenon they have seen on tv. This loop is now so tight that it's almost impossible to separate the sound from the echo, the event from the media response to it. From what Remy insists on calling the immediatization of history." [p. 485]  Middle east??
  • "In that instance I took refuge in the reasonable man's partial-knowledge defense: to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge." [p. 504]
  • "We change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves. Something like that." [p. 505]
  • "... whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. ...those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools." [p. 510]

Dale Burnett dale.burnett@uleth.ca
First Created  October 27, 2000
Last Revised   October 27, 2000
Copyright Dale Burnett 2000 all rights reserved